Foam and Cork Canoe

Activity Designer

This fun and easy craft really floats and makes a great tub toy. I'm one of those crafters who saves stuff to upcycle into crafts: interesting boxes, various sized jars and, for years, I've been saving wine corks, knowing that someday I'd find a crafty use for them. When my son asked for a canoe that he could play with in the tub, I knew just how to make it float. After we made the canoe, we thought it looked a little plain and lonely so we created a Native American Indian friend too.

What You'll Need

How We Did It

First, we assembled our supplies and began to heat up our hot glue gun.

Next, I sketched a paper canoe template.

Using a pen without its point, or another blunt object, kids can trace the paper canoe onto the brown foam. The lovely thing about foam is that it is easy to mark it for cutting without actually writing on it and that is just what we did.

Here's the impression from the blunt tip pen tracing the paper template onto the foam. You want to do this twice, once for each side of your canoe. Now we are ready to cut out our canoe.

My kids cut out the canoe. The younger ones needed some help with this.

Next, we hot-glued our corks together. I use a very low temperature glue gun and lots of supervision. My 8 year old has become really good with using the glue gun, so he glued the corks together for us.

Once the glue between the corks was solid, we glued the corks to the bottom of one side of the canoe.

Then we put a dot of glue at the top two corners of the canoe and glued the 2nd foam canoe to that.

Lastly, we glued the bottom of the second side of the canoe to the corks. Our canoe was finished! It was at this point in the project that we decided our canoe looked lonely and needed a friend.

Cut a square of brown foam (the face) and a larger rectangle of black foam (the hair). Hot glue the tops of the brown and black foam together. Then fold the black foam around and glue it to the brown (to make hair that will frame the face).

We cut the hair in a fringe design.

We glued a strip of red foam across the top of the head for a headband. Using a Sharpie (because that won't come off in water), we drew a zig zag pattern on the headband and a face.

Next, I gave my kids a pre-cut body and arms. We carefully hot glued those together. We also made a quick feather out of orange foam at my daughter's request.

Next, I drew a necklace on with the Sharpie and they added beads to it.